French audiences at the Cannes Film Festival booed Sofia Coppola’s sympathetic portrayal of their beheaded queen because it ignores the years of public struggle beyond her story. What they didn’t—or couldn’t—understand about Marie Antoinette is that it’s a thoroughly modern American movie, as ignorant to the reality of 18th-century French oppression as a gum-chewing high school student.

Revolutionary Americans could relate to French commoners’ democratic uprising, but teenagers born into the ‘80s era of punk and John Hughes comedies (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club) more readily identify with Marie Antoinette’s tragic, beautiful royal figure—an icon to the young, restless and hopelessly-in-love.

Coppola does this unabashedly. As she said during her Cannes press conference, “I didn’t want to make a historical epic.” This is Coppola’s third movie, and her third one about a fragile girl lost in a cold and insensitive place that’s full of pretty, shiny things. She personalizes Antoinette’s story for her generation’s consumerist crisis: privileged kids try to outrun their pain by shopping for shoes and dresses, only to return to their bedrooms sobbing, forced to face the demands of the real world waiting outside.

It works because Coppola confronts Antoinette’s inner drama honestly and without irony, unlike most recent pop teen movies that have pretended to chart the ups and downs of a girl’s premature coming-of-age (from Lindsay Lohan’s vapid Just My Luck to Hilary Duff’s sinister Material Girls), only to reaffirm Disney standards of materialism.

Coppola bears all of Antoinette’s imprudence and naiveté—her essential youthful flaws. Kirsten Dunst as Antoinette repeatedly appears stark naked, being changed into one of her poofy French court gowns. She is like a reborn baby in a new world, who will no doubt carelessly fall into the barbed traps set up for her by a merciless Versailles.

Marie Antoinette may not address the context of French history directly—neither, it seems, did Marie—but the Revolution’s own turmoil constantly lives outside of the frame, haunting the young girl’s life. By trapping herself inside of Antoinette’s head, Coppola doesn’t disrespect the French Revolution but takes a more universal political stance by recognizing that Antoinette is as human as the disgruntled rioters who rattle the gates of Versailles. Even if her problems aren’t as big, they’re just as real.

This is ultimately why Coppola fills her soundtrack with the sounds of ‘80s New Wave music rather than Mozart and does away with fake accents: to chip away at the distancing effects created between cultures and make her story’s emotional unrest palpable to a contemporary American audience.

Antoinette’s story is everyone’s, just a little more decadent. In a final act of utter humanity, the queen, now haggard, walks up to her murderous protestors and bows before them, as if to say, “We are all oppressed.”